Archive for the ‘communique’ Category

If you have been to one of the AEM Tech Events around the world you may have noticed Adobe is starting to heavily push their new templating language that hopefully will be available in AEM starting with the 6.0 release that’s scheduled for the beginning of next year. It also sounds like the templating language may be available for AEM5.6 as well. So what is it all about?

It seems the templating language code-named sightly will bring quite a big change to the developers working with AEM (CQ). The work is more shifted towards the front-end developers – the backend developers will be focusing more on java based development.

If you visited the AEM (CQ) Documentation today you may have noticed that the ‘current’ documentation is now for AEM 5.6.1 – While the download does not seem to be ready yet, the release notes are quite large and may be a good read for developers to get a head-start in order to understand what has changed.

In case you have not seen it, Adobe made a change to the security checklist for AEM/CQ. The section that was added just recently is an explanation on how to change the admin password for the felix console.

The following recommendation has been added:

In addition, Adobe recommends changing the OSGi (web) console password to something other than the admin password as not doing so:

Exposes the server with default password during startup and shutdown (that can take minutes for large servers)

Exposes the server when the repository is down/restarting bundle – and OSGI is running.

When exploring AEMs default website geometrixx or geometrixx-media with a Windows8 device that has a touch screen (some of the newer laptops on the market for example) you are either forwarded to a .tablet.html page (geometrixx) or the mobile site (geometrixx-outdoors). This seems to be a problem with the device detection that is part of AEM5.6. A tool called BrowserMap is used to perform a client slide test to determine your type of device and then you are redirected based on your device and a set of settings on the site.

The documentation from Adobe on how to set up your site for device detection can be found here

As you can see, the detection thinks the browser is running on a tablet.

Looking at the /content/geometrixx/jcr:content/cq:siteVariant node and the /content/geometrixx_mobile/jcr:content/cq:siteVariant node they both have a cq:variantFamily property with the value ‘geometrixx’. For the main website the media property is set to ‘browser, oldBrowser, highResolutionDisplay’, for the _mobile site to ‘smartphone, tablet, highResolutionDisplay’ – for whatever reason, this is not a String Array property but just a comma separated list and the node type is nt:unstructured – cq:siteVariant is the actual name that the browser detection is looking for.

What’s interesting to me is that on geometrixx, a selector called tablet is added and the browser stays on the same page while the setup in geometrixx-outdoors seems to be the same but there the browser is redirected to the mobile version of the site.

You can force AEM to use a specific device and bypass the BrowserMap detection by adding the parameter device=[device group name] to the URL. The supported device groups by default are:

smartphone

tablet

highResolutionDisplay

browser

oldBrowser (the latest version of Firefox is considered an oldBrowser)

The BrowserMap library is available on github at https://github.com/raducotescu/browsermap. The testpage that’s available within AEM is also available online at http://raducotescu.github.com/browsermap/index.html – the library in AEM seems to be a bit more up to date since it can detect IE10 on Windows 8 (although it thinks that it does not have touch capabilities) – the one on github just reports it does not know the browser.

On the bright side, geometrixx-media does not need the browser detection since it’s a responsive design based website. I highly recommend going that route.

Orange County/CA CQ Meetup

CQBlueprints

Have you had a look at cqblueprints.com yet? We feature information about development with Adobe CQ5.4 and 5.5 as well as a custom google search that makes it easy to find CQ related information on the web by limiting the search results to CQ specific sites.